If you are involved in sending bulk SMS through multiple cell phone carriers in multiple countries, you’ll want to make sure you follow the different rules and regulations that come up with each phone carrier and country. For example, when it comes to the sender's ID, some countries might require it in alphabetic form while others might require numeric. Some phone carriers are not built in a way to support Unicode formats while some filter messages with certain keywords. Not complying with local regulations will lead to the failure of your SMS campaigns as the required text will not be delivered to the recipients.
It is recommended to conduct a phone carrier look-up for each phone number at least once. However, the records say that 35% of the phone numbers change the carriers monthly. If you rely on SMS marketing, having your carrier look-ups frequently will help maintain the effectiveness of the data.
Many businesses choose to ignore the phone carrier look-up and with time they realize the hard-hit on their wallets. Accepting the necessity of cell phone carrier look-up, here’s everything you need to know about doing a phone carrier look-up.
What is a Wireless Phone Carrier Look-up?
In the most general terms, wireless phone carrier look-up is to know the wireless carrier or network being used to send out text messages to the prospects/customers.
The customer owns the phone, not the phone number. A phone carrier look-up helps to know which wireless carrier owns the phone number.
Each wireless carrier has a carrier ID number. A multi-purpose phone validation tool like ClearoutPhone gives you information about the carrier or service provider by identifying this number.
Knowing the carrier services demonstrates two things:
Firstly, that you are familiar with the recipient, thus reducing the chances of having your text treated as unsolicited.
Secondly, text messaging software servers become capable of determining the best way to deliver a text based on carrier information.
Do I need to do a phone carrier look-up?
If you are dependent on SMS marketing, YES!
Sending personal text messages and sending out bulk messages as a business company is different. You need to weigh many factors to save yourself from penalties and loss for the latter.
Sending out thousands of promotional messages texts in a day is not possible using a standard 10-digit number. You need a short code, toll-free, or 10DLC phone number under which you can shoot out your SMS campaigns.
And when you opt for a 3rd party software to send bulk SMS messages, such software needs to know the carrier of the phone numbers for sending out the messages.
Also, keeping in mind the facility to port phone numbers, the carrier look-up you did six months back might not be valid anymore. And, if the 3rd party software has the wrong carrier information, it cannot route the message data properly, leading to multiple failures.
To avoid this problem, you must perform a carrier look-up periodically to keep your database updated. This brings us to the next question- how to check the phone carrier of a number.
How can I do a phone carrier look-up with a phone number?
To perform a carrier look-up or service provider look-up for a phone number, you need to use a phone validator like ClearoutPhone.
ClearoutPhone is a global phone validator across 240+ countries, providing the facility of knowing the carrier by just entering the phone number. By just entering the phone number, you get significant details related to the phone number – the validity, location, line type, and carrier.
What are the different ways to do a phone carrier look-up?
1. Instant or Quick Phone Validation: You can use this phone number validation method to validate a single number at a time. Here’s how you validate someone’s phone number in seconds.
In seconds you will have the phone number’s validity, location, line type, and carrier or service provider.
2. Bulk Phone Validation: WIth a business to run- it's impossible to validate thousands of phone numbers one by one. This is where Bulk Phone Validation comes as a life-saver.
ClearoutPhone’s Bulk Phone validation lets you upload the contact phone list & clean up your database with just a single click.
It supports batch files in CSV or XLSX format. Once validation completes, you can download the result along with the original file or by appending only the required fields at the time of download. You can then filter the results as per your requirements.
3. Real-time Phone Validation with API: People often mistype their phone numbers while signing up. And it can be annoying to lose a potential customer due to a stupid error.
ClearoutPhone’s real-time Phone validation API can be easily integrated into your websites or mobile apps, ensuring that only valid numbers enter your database.
Benefits of Using a Phone Validator:
Performing phone number validation helps you in many ways, not just in identifying the carrier. Here are the advantages of validating numbers:
So, don’t wait anymore and get the best of your SMS marketing campaign by validating the numbers. Sign Up on ClearoutPhone for free!
While there are many phone number validators in the market that would give you phone carrier details, ClearoutPhone stands to be the best in the market.
It is appreciated and trusted by thousands of organizations for its high accuracy, fast turnaround speed, easy usability, and seamless integrations.
Carrier look-up can be performed for both national and international numbers around the globe depending on the coverage of the tool used. ClearoutPhone covers 240+ countries with the line type and phone carrier look-up.
Yes, but it varies from tool to tool. ClearoutPhone connects with CRMs and can be integrated with any application of your choice via Zapier and Integrately.